Be careful calling Vista a RAM hog, most of the time what you are doing is increasing your performance at the cost of RAM. Most of your RAM will go to superfetch, which is just basically a caching system for frequently used programs. Use this program to see what Vista is doing with your RAM, most of it is spent to make your computer run faster. Note that superfetch is easily turned off so claiming Vista is a RAM hog is not a legitimate reason for declaring it inferior to XP. If you don't have 600 MB of RAM to offer your OS in the name of speeding your life up tell your OS you would like the RAM back, Vista will give it back.

The biggest piece advice I can give you is disable the search indexer, it's a terrible resource hog.

You can strip Vista to run just like XP, but with some common sense elements added into the kernel (native DVD burning support, encryption, hard drive backup), when Vista is run like this it is far superior to XP in my opinion. If you are going to leave all of Vista's options and goodies enabled you will notice a large performance hit and it's overall not a good experience.

Edit: Also, Vista (SP1) rivals XP in stability. If you don't believe that, I just looked, I use my computer 6 hours or more a day and I have over 17 days of uptime right now. If someone posting here with XP is beating that I'd be surprised, and it should be noted it's still running fine.

I do love XP, but I believe a lot of the Vista bashing people in general do is due to the fact they just aren't familiar with it. I took the side of Vista to even the score and dispel some myths. Believe me, I have some interesting stories about Vista bugs... (pre-SP1)

I run Vista x64 Ultimate. I have a fast processor. I have 8GB RAM recognized by my Operating System cos I'm not stuck in a 32-bit address space.

Yeah, the frontend doesn't look all that different. Whoop de doo I can see through the borders of my windows and shit.

Vista is a revolutionary technology-based OS release. It is meant to provide a solid base for advanced technologies dealing with system functions not readily visible to the user. The audio, print, display and networking subsystems have been completely restructured. These back-end changes actually are revolutionary, but are only visible to software developers.

Vista uses memory in a very different way from XP. Vista will store program information in system memory based on learned user usage patterns - analyzing user patterns via machine learning - so that those programs load and operate faster on subsequent runs.